Castro's Cuba: a revolution betrayed?

2111201701.

Q972.B1063 079 1C LAC COP. 2

the new
Leader

SECTION TWO

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A REVOLUTION BETRAYED?
Theodore Draper

THE

NETTIE LEE BENSON

LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTION

of

The General Libraries

University of Texas

at Austin

PRESENTED BY
Mary Gardner

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodore Draper has spent the last 25 years as a journalist,
historian and editor who has specialized in international affairs
and American foreign policy, with extended excursions into the
history of the American labor movement in general and the
American Communist movement in par-
ticular. He has worked in and written
about France, Germany, Morocco, Haiti,
Guatemala, Mexico, the Dominican Re-
public. Cuba and other countries.

The author of four books, his first,
The Six Weeks' War — a study of the
French defeat of 1940 — appeared m
1944. His second, The Battle of Ger-
many > published in 1946, was the of-
ficial history of the 84th Infantry
Division, the unit with which he served
in World War II. When the project on Communism in American
Life was formed by the Fund for the Republic, Draper was
asked to write the history of the Communist party of the United
States from its beginnings to 1945. His first volume in this series,
The Roots of American Communism, came out in 1957; the
second, American Communism and Soviet Russia, was issued
in May of last year. He plans to start working on the third
and final volume, dealing with the period 1930-45, next fall.

This supplement is published by special arrangement with the British
magazine Encounter. Copyright (§) 1961 by Encounter.

The Nfcw i.i t PuMUIilhI weekly (except July and August: semi- monthly) hy Tlit

American LHbor Conference On International Affairs, Inc. Publication OBicr: 34 N, Crystal

Street, EnsL Slroudsburg, Pa. Editorial and executive <.ilTici; : 7 E. 15-th Si ret t. New York 3,
N. Y.

MIIIUIBIIIIM MIWWUimMIBM^

A REVOLUTION BETRAYED?

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ImniiiinnuHi [iiinEiiiiiuinniiEiiEi^iemmiiBy Theodore DLraperiiiiHtiiEi^iueiimiinthntiiiiiiiiiiiriiiiinnimuHii mm

Who IS Fidel Castro? What is he? After two years in power, he still
evades both his defenders and detractors. In the first months of
his regime, Castro used to speak of "humanism," which he defined as
"liberty with bread without terror"— hardly a political or social program.
But after trying it out a few times, he dropped it in favor of even more
ambiguous formulas. When he or his associates were asked what kind of
society they were building or what it should be called, they usually answered
that they were building "a reality, not a theory," or that they were interested
"in deeds, not words," or that their revolution was "indigenously Cuban.
Castro still refuses to be pinned down to anything more definite and, until
he commits himself, the question officially remains open.

At a youth congress in Havana last August, however, Ernesto Guevara
Minister of Industry and former president of the National Bank
of Cuba— whose bank notes are signed with his nickname, ' Che,
nothing more—took a long step toward giving the regime an ideology and
a name. Since Guevara is the ideological eminence grise of Castro's regime,
he has a habit of saying today what Castro will say tomorrow. He said:
"What is our ideology? If I were asked whether our revolution is Com-
munist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its
methods the paths that Marx pointed out." In "Notes for the Study of the
Ideology of the Cuban Revolution," published last October in the magazine
Verde Olivo, Guevara wrote: "The principal actors of this revolution had
no coherent theoretical criteria; but it cannot be said that they were ignorant
of the various concepts of history, society, economics and revolution which
are being discussed in the world today." Then he declared: "We, practical
revolutionaries, initiating our own struggle, simply fulfill laws foreseen
by Marx the scientist,"

These statements raise more intriguing questions than they pretend to
answer Did Guevara mean to imply that the ideology was "Marxist but
not "Communist?" Was it the "Marxism" of the Communists or some other
"Marxism?" Did Fidel, Guevara and the others really come upon Marxism
as if they were bright but naive children rediscovering the roundness of the
earth? Could the "laws" of "Marx the scientist," which have not been
fulfilled anywhere else, be fulfilled in the little island of Cuba by those
who did not know what they were doing until after they had done it?
Guevara's explanation obviously explains too little or too much. But

Castro, Guevara and other Cuban leaders have spoken much more freely
and at far greater length to a chosen few who have become their foreign
interpreters and apologists. This growing band, however, has not had an
easy time of it, and has been forced to do much of the theorizing that the
Cubans have refused to do for themselves. In time, every revolution has
created its own mythology but, in this case, these foreign sympathizers, in
lieu of embracing one ready-made, have had to produce their own. Each
of these sympathizers has made his own characteristic contribution to this
mythology which, if nothing else, tells us what those who feel closest to
Castro make of him. The situation is undoubtedly an oddity but, then, the
Cuban revolution is an odd one.

1. THE MYTH MAKERS

ONE OF THE FIRST and favorite myths has been that of Castro's "peasant
revolution."

It turned up in the articles written and interviews given by the French
writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who spent March 1960 in
Cuba. After the usual hectic round of short trips and long talks, Sartre
wrote a series of 16 articles in France-soir. In one of them he related how
he had informed the Cubans that, like the Chinese, they had made a
"peasant revolution." The Cuban reaction, he reported, was divided: the
"bearded ones" (those who had fought in the mountains) agreed with him;
the "unbearded ones" (those who had fought in the resistance movements
in the cities) maintained that the peasants had fought little or badly and that
the revolution had sprung from the cities.

Mme. de Beauvoir gave a somewhat different version in an interview in
France Observateur. She said that the petty-bourgeoisie had begun by
stirring up the urban revolution while the peasants had held back; then,
bit by bit, the peasants had joined in, the "immediate interests*' of the
victorious revolution had become those of the peasant class, and thus "despite
its origins, the urban revolution can be considered a peasant revolution."

As a full-fledged theory, however, the Cuban peasant revolution made its
appearance in the book, Cuba, Anatomy of a Revolution, by Leo Huberman
and Paul M. Sweezy, editors of the magazine, Monthly Review. After three
weeks in Cuba, they were persuaded that the revolution had succeeded be-
cause the peasants as a class had actively joined the rebels and had become
"one with the revolutionary army." Fidel Castro appeared to them to be
"the embodiment of the revolutionary will and energy of the peasantry."
As for the kind of system that this peasant revolution had brought forth,
Huberman and Sweezy "have no hesitation in answering: the hew Cuba is
a socialist, Cuba"

Six months later, they paid another three-week visit to Cuba. By this time,
the Castro regime had nationalized a large part of the Cuban economy. This
development caused them to revise their previous estimate— the Cuban
revolution was no longer "essentially a peasant revolution" because the
working dass had finally been "swept" into it. Castro himself had not yel

reached the point of calling himself a "Marxist," but the two visitors ^con-
ferred on him the distinction of having arrived, by virtue of his own rich
experience" and "sharp and fertile mind," at an "unmistakably Marxist
interpretation in a way that would have made Marx himself "proud to
acknowledge him as a disciple." Despite Castro's "modesty," however they
heard so much about a socialist Cuba that it had become a "commonplace,
in contrast to their first trip, during which no one had spoken to them of
Cuba as a socialist country, and socialism was not even included among the
revolution's ultimate goals.

And so, in the spring of 1960, a new path to socialism was discovered—
a peasant revolution led by the middle-class son of a wealthy landowner.
And in the fall of 1960, there was more certainty than ever of the socialist
revolution in Cuba because the working class bad at last caught up with it^
Other Castro sympathizers have gone farther. Paul Johnson of the British
weekly, New Statesman, took a quick look at Cuba and reported that Castro
had come to power through a "peasant revolution" but governs through a
genuine dictatorship of the proletariat," expressed through the "arbitrary
rule of one man. In the New Republic, Professor Samuel Schapiro, an
American academic advocate for Castro, merely limited himself to com-
menting that "the heart of the revolution, the land reform program, is
essentially Marxist." And C Wright Mills of Columbia University bas made
an anthology of all the things that Castro and his closest associates say of
themselves, at least as of last August.

Professor Mills' recently published book, Listen, Yankee! is a peculiarly
useful and exasperating work. It purports to be "the voice of the Cuban
revolutionary," not that of its author. From the conversations I had in
Cuba last April, I can testify that the Castro leaders talk much in the way
Mills has recorded them. Sometimes the words in the book were so close
to those I had heard that I felt I knew the name of the source. To this
extent, Mills has made himself the vehicle of -the purest and most direct
propaganda, unlike the others who talked to more or less the same people
but passed on in their own name what they had been told. No one ever
said "Listen, Yankee !" or "Yankee this" and "Yankee that" to me, but
except for this touch of artistic license, I consider these long monologues
more or less authentic. Anyone who wants to get the Castro party line most
nakedly can get it here.

Nevertheless, Mills has put his name to the book and in the last lew
pages gives the Castro case his personal endorsement. He says that he
leaves it to the reader to agree or disagree with the points in it, as if
there might be one non-Cuban reader in a hundred or a thousand with the
necessary background. A reader has a right to expect that the author should
do some work of his own beyond listening only to one side, and that a
sociologist would at least be able to give a reasonably accurate report of

the worltinR class, compared lt>j»n,js0fl about

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the social structure of the country. The book as a whole is just as honest and
dishonest as any unrelieved propaganda is likely to be, and if Mills merely
sought to be a front man for the Castro propaganda machine, he has suc-
ceeded brilliantly. But is that all that should he expected of C. Wright Mills?
Mills' Cubans — one never knows where they end and he begins — are not
altogether in agreement with Sweezy and Huberman. First, Mills tells what
the revolution was not— "not a fight between peasants and landowners, or
between wage workers and capitalists— either Cuban or Yankee; nor was it
a direct nationalist battle between Cubans and foreigners." It was "not an
'economically determined' revolution — either in its origins or in its sources."
Nor was it '"a revolution by labor unions or wage workers in the city, or
by labor parties, or by anything like that." What was it then? The leaders
were "young intellectuals and students from the University of Havana"—
they are also called "a few middle-class students and intellectuals"— who
made "a lot of first moves for a long time before some of their moves began
to pay oil." The revolution "really began" when, in one of these moves,
"a handful of these young intellectuals really got together with the peasants."
Thus Mills' version contains no nonsense about a "peasant revolution";
it merely claims that the decisive forces in the insurrectionary period were
the intellectuals and the peasants, with the former in total command. There
is also no nonsense about the workers making the revolution: they are said
to have joined in after the victory, and their "revolutionary consciousness"
has allegedly been aroused only in recent months. At this point, however,
mythology takes over and Mills also has the workers superseding the peasants
as a revolutionary force. But the greatest nonsense is written about the
middle class. The original "handful" of leaders admittedly came exclusively
from that class. Nevertheless, the mythology requires that "the middle classes
generally supported the revolution, at least in a passive way, during the
insurrectionary period, although as a class they had little to do with making
it. I take it this means that most members of the middle class supported
the revolution passively or not at all-
Mills has also compiled a number of programmatic statements by Castro's
group. There is still the old reluctance to be pinned down to anything
definite, because a "political system" would hamper the leaders, because
very few people care about it anyway, or because the very lack of a system
proves that it is democratic. But this motif slides gently into another one:
"We ourselves don't quite know what to call what we are building, and we
don't care. It is, of course, socialism of a sort." Or, whatever the system is,
the Cubans discovered it all by themselves: "In so far as we are Marxist or
Leftist (or Communist, if you will) in our revolutionary development and
thought, it is not due to any prior commitment in our ideology. It is because
of our own development." Still later in the book, Castro's Cuba becomes "a
dictatorship of, by and for the peasants and the workers of Cuba" or "a
dictatorship of the people." Mills himself considers Castro's regime to be "a
revolutionary dictatorship of die peasants and workers of Cuba" in which
one man possesses "virtually absolute power."

All these theories by Sartre and de Beauvoir, Huberman and Sweezy,

Johnson and Schapiro, Mills' Cubans and Mills, cannot be true but they
have one thing in common — they serve the purpose of concealing the fact
that the Cuban revolution was essentially a middle-class revolution which
has been used to destroy the middle class. And without understanding this
apparent contra diction, very little can be understood of Castro's Cuba as
a social system.

2. TERROR AND COUNTERTERROR

To BEGIN WITH, what truth is there in Castro's "peasant revolution?"
The 82 men under Castro who invaded Cuba from Mexico in Decem-
ber 1956 and the 12 who survived to fight in the mountainous Sierra Maestra
at the eastern end of the island all came from the middle class. Castro
himself was their ideal representative — son of a rich landowner, university
graduate, lawyer. The guajiros, or peasants, in the mountains were utterly
alien to most of them. But they had to win the confidence of the peasants to
obtain food, to protect themselves from dictator Fulgencio Batista's spies
and soldiers, to gain new recruits. As the months passed, the relations be-
tween them and the peasants took on a new dimension. The crying poverty,
illiteracy, disease and primitivism of the outcast peasants appalled the young
city-bred ex-Students. Out of this experience, partly practical and partly
emotional, came a determination to revolutionize Cuban society by raising
the lowest and most neglected sector to a civilized level of well-being and
human dignity.

But, for over a year, Castro's fighting force was so small that he did not
expect to overthrow Batista from the mountains. 2 Victory was foreseen
through the vastly larger resistance movement in the cities, overwhelmingly
middle class in composition. This calculation was behind the ill-fated general
strike of April 9, 1958. 3 It failed because the middle class could not carry
off a general strike. Only the workers and trade unions could do so, and
they refused mainly for two reasons: they were doing too well under Batista
to take the risk, and the official Cuban Communists deliberately sabotaged
the strike because they had not been consulted and no attempt was made to
reach an agreement with them in advance. Without the key transport workers
under Communist leadership, the strike was doomed. The National Com-
mittee of the Communist party, known since the last war as the Partido
Socialista Popular, issued a statement (on April 12, 1958), a copy of which
I have seen, blaming the fiasco on the "unilateral call" for the strike by
the leadership of Castro's 26th of July Movement in Havana under Faustino
Perez/

x. Ca&tro himself described his isolated and ncar-desperat* situation In his letter of December 51st, 1S3T,
to the . w ca S Council of Liberation- "For those who are Uclitine gainst an anny Incomparable In • ™ber
Sdte^nrfl without mr support durlw a whole :ear other than the dim ty ^ r ^'' ch "? ""^S* f £
a raiion whluh we lovo *lnccrelT and the conrlct on that it la worth while W die foi »t. bitterly forttotten Dt
ftfS£ra£nan JbJ. TSS™»«£* .11 the w V > ind »iu, 1.™ , Bpu-matl^ly (not to »ay gria, inaUyi
JwiU-rl an choir helu " The entire document Is contained In J ales Dubois' "Fids! CairtTO 1 1033 > . to UUS

A. Castro's manlftHto of March 12th, 1&58. reads in part: ". . : 2. That th» rtrmtcgr of th& WW St"**
should bo based cm tho nmmal revolutionary strike, to bs seconded by uiUltary action. . , .
*■ Declrvftclonca del F.8.P.. 12 de abrll d* 1558.

In the mountains at this time, Mills was told ? the arme<l men under Castro
numbered only about 300. Four months later, in August 1958, the two
columns commanded by Majors Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, entrusted
with the mission of cutting the island in two, the biggest single rebel opera-
tion of the entire struggle, amounted, according to Guevara, to 220 men."
Sartre was informed that the total number of harbudos in a][ Cuba from
beginning to end was only 3,000. Castro's fighting force was until the end
so minute that it hardly deserves to be called an army, let alone a "peasant
army," and even the influx of the last four or five months failed to give it
anything like a mass character. In -any case, the character of an army is
established by its leadership and cadres, which remained exclusively middle
class throughout, and not by its common soldiers — or every army in the
world would similarly be an army of the peasantry and proletariat.

How could such a small band "defeat" Batista's Army of over 40,000?

The answer is that it did not defeat Batista's Army in any military sense.
It succeeded in making Batista destroy himself. Until the spring of 1958,
life in most of Cuba went on much as usual. But the fiasco of the April
strike forced Castro to change his tactics. Disappointed in his hopes of a
mass uprising, he shifted over to full-scale guerrilla warfare — bombings,
sabotage, hit-and-run raids. Batista's answer to the terror was countertenor.
The Armv and Secret Police struck back blindly, indiscriminately, sense-
lessly. The students, blamed as the main trouble makers, were their chief
victims. It became safer for young men to take to the hills than to walk ir
the streets. The orgy of murders, tortures and brutalities sent tremors of
fear and horror through the entire Cuban people and especially the middle-
class parents of the middle-class students.

This universal revulsion in the last six months of Batista's rule penetrated
and permeated his own Army and made it incapable of carrying out the
offensive which it launched in May against Castro's hideout. As Mills'
book says, Batista's Army "just evaporated." The engagements between
the two sides were so few and inconclusive that Batista's abdication caught
Castro by surprise. The real victor in this struggle was not Castro's "peasant
army" but the entire Cuban people. The heaviest losses were suffered by the
largely middle-class urban resistance movement, which secreted the political
and psychological acids that ate into Batista's fighting force; Sartre was told
that Batista's Army and police killed 1,000 barbudos in the last clashes in
the mountains and 19,000 in the urban resistance movement.

Castro's guerrilla tactics, then, aimed not so much at "defeating" the enemy
as at inducing him to lose his head, fight terror with counterterror on the
largest possible scale, and make life intolerable for the ordinary citizen.
These tactics can be employed by even a few hundred rebels, and they are
■now being applied against the democratic government of Romulo lietan-
court in Venezuela. The same terror that Castro used against Batista is now
being used against Castro. And Castro has responded with counterterror,
just as Batista did.

"■ Yerdo Qlivo, October 8, lilfiO.

3. THE PROMISED LAND

THE STRUGGLE for power also helps to answer the question: Was the
Cuban revolution "betrayed?" The answer obviously depends on what
revolution one has in mind— the revolution that Castro promised before
taking power, or the one he has made since taking power.

Huberman and Sweezy have written: "Fidel had made his promises and
was determined to carry them out, faithfully and to the letter." But neither
they, nor Mills, nor Sartre, ever say what these promises were. The oversight
has been a necessary part of the mythology.

I have made a brief inventory of the promises, political and economic,
made by Castro from his "History Will Absolve Me" speech (at his trial in
1953) to the end of 1953. These promises have already become so embar-
rassing that some of his literary champions have begun to rewrite history
(after less than two years!) by avoiding all mention of them. G

Political: ., ,

• Castro's 1953 speech predicted that the first revolutionary law would n-e
restoration of the 1940 Constitution and made an allusion to a "government
of popular election."

• Castro's manifesto of July 1957, his first political declaration from the
Sierra Maestra, contained a "formal promise" of general elections at the end
of one year and an "absolute guarantee" of freedom of information, press,
and all 'individual and political rights guaranteed by the 1940 Constitution.

• Castro's letter of December 14, 1957, to the Cuban exiles upheld the
"prime duty" of the post-Batista provisional government to hold general
elections and the right of political parties, even during the provisional govern-
ment, to put forward programs, organize, and participate in the elections.

■ In an article in Coronet magazine of February 1958, Castro wroie of
fighting for a "genuine representative government," "truly honest" general
elections within 12 months, "full and untrammelled" freedom of public in-
formation and all communication media, and re-establishment of all personal
and political rights set forth in the 1940 Constitution. The greatest irony is
that be defended himself against the accusation "of plotting to replace military
dictatorship with revolutionary dictatorship "

* Tn his answers to Jules Dubois of May 1958, Castro pledged "full en-
forcement" of the 1940 Constitution and "a provisional government of
entirely civilian character that will return the country to normality and hold
general elections within a period of no more than one year."
= • In the unity manifesto of July 1958, Castro agreed "to guide our

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p$St%cmm. which mifiUt have put Corn's pnrtaku to a ™^' l !» J™ liBllL
Mills ¥iju»ly inures tlw whole collection of Castro'a pie-power pledges.

nation, after the fall of the tyrant, to normality by instituting a brief pro-
visional government that will lead the country to full constitutional and
democratic procedures.* 1

Economic:

• In the 1953 speech, Castro supported grants of land to small planters
and peasants, with indemnification to the former owners; the rights of
workers to share in profits; a greater share of the cane crop to all planters;
and confiscation of all illegally obtained property. His land reform advocated
maximum holdings for agricultural enterprises and the distribution of re-
maining land to farming families; it also provided for encouragement of
"agricultural cooperatives for the common use of costly equipment, cold
storage plants, and a single professional technical direction in cultivation
and breeding." In addition, the speech expressed the intention of national-
izing the electric and telephone companies.

• The manifesto of July 1957 defined the agrarian reform as distribution
of barren lands, with prior indemnification, and conversion of share-croppers
and squatters into proprietors of the lands worked on.

• The Coronet article favored a land reform to give peasants clear title
to the land, with "just compensation of expropriated owners." It declared
that Castro had no plans for expropriating or nationalizing foreign invest-
ments and that he had suspended an earlier program to extend government
ownership to public utilities. On nationalization, he wrote:

I personally have come to feel that nationalization is, at best a
cumbersome instrument. It does not seem to make the state any
stronger, yet it enfeebles private enterprise. Even more importantly,
any attempt at wholesale nationalization would obviously hamper the
principal point of our economic platform — industrialization at the
fastest possible rate. For this purpose, foreign investments will always
be welcome and secure here.

• In May 1958, he assured his biographer, Jules Dubois;

Never has the 26th of July Movement talked about socializing or
nationalizing the industries. This is simply stupid fear of our revolu-
tion. We have proclaimed from the first day that we fight for the full
-enforcement of the Constitution of 1940, whose norms establish guaran-
tees, rights and obligations for all the elements that have a part in
production. Comprised therein is free enterprise and invested capital
as well as many other economic, civic, and political rights.

• The unity manifesto of July 1958, which was written by Castro, merely
called for:

A minimum governmental program that will guarantee the punish-
ment of the guilty ones, the rights of the workers, the fulfilment of

10

international commitments, public order, peace, freedom, as well as
the economic, social, and political progress of the Cuban people.

Such were the promises that Fidel had made. The near-unanimity with
which Castro's victory was accepted in January 1959 was the result not
merely of his heroic struggle and glamorous beard but of the political
consensus which he appeared to embody. This consensus had resulted from
the democratic disappointments of 1944-52 and the Batista despotism of
1952-53, There was broad agreement that Cuba could never go back to the
corrupt brand of democracy of the past, and the Cuban middle class was
ready for deep-going social and political reforms to make impossible another
Prio Socarras and another Batista. Castro promised to restore Cuban
democracy and make it work, not a "direct" or "people's" democracy
but the one associated with the 1940 Constitution which was so radical
that much of it. especially the provision for agrarian reform, was never
implemented.

It is, moreover, unthinkable that Castro could have won power if he had
given the Cuban people the slightest forewarning of what he has presented
them with— a wholly government-controlled press and all other means of
communication, ridicule of elections, wholesale confiscation and socializa-
tion, "cooperatives" that are (as Huberman and Sweezy admit) virtually
"slate farms," or a dictatorship of any kind, including that of the proletariat.
It was precisely the kind of promises Castro made that enabled him to win
the support of the overwhelming majority of the Cuban middle and other
classes; a "peasant revolution" would hardly have been expressed in quite
the same way.

The least that can be said, therefore, is that Castro promised one kind
of revolution and made another. The revolution Castro promised was un-
questionably betrayed.

4. THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

THE Castro mythology tends to distort not only the original nature of
the Cuban revolution but also the character of Cuban society.
Pages are written by Huberman and Sweezy about the peasantry, a
single paragraph about the working class, and almost nothing about the
middle class. Mills never seems to have made up his mind which Cubans
were speaking through him. Judging hy his own list of the Cubans who
spoke to him, there was not a worker, and certainly not a peasant, in the
lot. Without exception, his informants were middle-class intellectuals and
professionals of the type in power. Sometimes he makes them speak in their
own name; more often they masquerade as the most impoverished and
miserable of Cuban peasants. They say, "we squatted on the edge of the
road in our filthy huts," as if they were the "we" and as if this was typical
of all Cubans. The average reader might imagine that Cuba was nothing
but "a place of misery and filth, illiteracy and exploitation, and sloth."
This may be a triumph of propaganda but it is a travesty of sociology.

II

Cuba before Castro was, indeed, a country with serious social problems,
but it was far from being a peasant country or even a typically "under-
developed" one. Its population was more urban than rural: 57 per cent in
the urban areas and 43 per cent in tbe rural, with the trend strongly in
favor of the former (according to the Geogra/ia de Cuba written by Antonio
Nuiiez Jimenez, tbe present director of the Agrarian Reform Institute) .
The people dependent on agriculture for a living made up about 40 per cent,
and of these over one-quarter were classified as farmers and ranchers. In
1954, the national income was divided as follows; the sugar industry, agri-
cultural and industrial, 25 per cent; other agriculture, 13 per cent; other
industry and commerce, 40 per cent; everything else, 21 per cent.

The standard of living, low by U.S. and West European standards, was
comparatively high by Latin American; only three countries, Venezuela,
Argentina and Chile, rated above Cuba in per capita income; Cuba's was
almost as high as Italy's and much higher than Japan's. Cuba ranked fifth
in Latin America jn manufacturing, behind Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and
Chile. Cuba had one automobile for every 39 inhabitants (in Argentina, 60;
Mexico, 91; Brazil, 158), and one radio for every five inhabitants (second
to Argentina, with one out of three). Cuban tourists were able to spend
more in the United States than American tourists spent in Cuba. After
World War II, Cuban interests were strong enough to buy a substantial
share of U.S.-owned sugar production which fell from 70-80 per cent of
the total at its high point in the 1930s to about 35 per cent in 1958. Govern-
ment encouragement of "Cubanization" would easily have cut the figure in
half again in a short time under a post-Batista democratic regime.

I am not trying to suggest that Cuba's economy was a healthy one. It
was precariously dependent on the fluctuations of a single crop, sugar, which
accounted for more than 80 per cent of Cuban exports and employed about
a half million workers for only three to four months a year. As the rates
of illiteracy show — 41.7 per cent in the rural areas and only 11.6 per cent
in the urban areas — the social development of Cuba was shockingly un-
balanced in favor of the cities and towns, and Castro's crusade for the
peasantry has repaid the Cuban upper and middle classes for decades of
indifference to the welfare of the land workers.

But this is not the same thin?; as implying (as Mills often does) that
Cuba was nothing but a land of backward, illiterate, diseased, starving
peasants. When he writes, "We speak Spanish, we are mainly rural, and
we are poor," the first statement is undoubtedly correct, the second is
demonstrably false, and the third is partly true. Cuba was one of the most
middle-class countries in Latin America.

In effect, this mythology of the Cuban social structure makes Castro's
victory inexplicable. If a "handful" of middle-class "students and intel-
lectuals" had the active support of only a few hundred or even a few
thousand peasants, without either the working or middle classes (as Mills
maintains), the Batista regime would never have toppled. It was the desertion
of the middle class — on which Batista's power was based — {hat caused his
regime to disintegrate from within and bis Army to evaporate.

12

1

5. ECLIPSE OF A MOVEMENT

Castro's "betrayal" of the Cuban revolution has also taken another
form.

When Batista fell, two movements entered into competition— Castro's
26th of July Movement (named after the elate of his first unsuccessful at-
tempt in 1953) and the official Communist party, the Partido Socialista
Popular. The odds seemed to favor the former overwhelmingly. In his
first victory address at Camp Liberty, Castro spoke of the popular sympathy
and almost unanimous support of the Cuban youth which the 26th of July
Movement enjoyed, and he appeared to argue that there was no need for
any other movement.

But a different fate soon awaited the 26th oF July Movement. The reason,
as it was explained to Mine, de Beauvoir, is most revealing:

The 26lh of July Movement, from which the revolution issued, had
an apparatus, but a petty-bourgeois one, which could not follow the
revolution in the radicalization that has been proceeding since the
taking of power; it was not capable of going along with the advance
of the agrarian reform. So it was permitted to fall away.

Mme. de Beauvoir passes on this information without the slightest in-
dication that there might have been something unwholesome in this pro-
cedure. But apart from the justification for Castro's decision to eviscerate
his own movement, she confirms the middle-class character of that move-
ment and Castro's political reason for condemning it to a nominal existence
—the difference between its revolution and his.

Not so long ago also, there was no higher honor in Castro's Cuba than
to belong to the rebel army. It was the chief basis of Castro's rule; army
men actually ran the country through ostensibly civilian organizations, such
as the Agrarian Reform Institute. When Huberman and Swcezy first visited
Cuba last March, they reported that "from January 1, 195% to this day the
real power has always been in the revolutionary army, manned and nourished
by as radical a social class as any in the world today" — the Cuban peasantry.
But on their second visit six months later, they noted the "(relative)
eclipse" of the rebel army and the officially inspired rise of the large,
amorphous militia. Indeed, in their December 1960 article, they no longer
refer to it as the rebel army; it bad become the "regular army." Instead
of the "truly most remarkable relations of solidarity, trust, and under-
standing" between Castro and the army at the time of their book, they
intimated that it had become a potential counterrevolutionary force, typical
of Latin American "standing armies." Once the rebel army's peasant charac-
ter had been its greatest glory; now it had apparently become a serious
drawback. Bohemia Libre, the edition in exile of Cuba's most famous maga-
zine, has gone so far as to say editorially that the rebel army "already does
not exist." In any case, it has gone the way of the 26th of July Movement.

13

The fate of David Salvador, the outstanding labor leader of the 26th
of July Movement, tells the same story. Before Batista fell, Salvador rep-
resented the underground group, "Labor Unity," and coordinated the resist-
ance within the working class. At a time when the pfficial Cuban Commu-
nists opposed Castro as a "putschist," Salvador believed in him and in
the last period of Batista's rule went to jail for his underground activity. After
the victory, he took over the leadership of the Cuban labor movement for
the 26th of July Movement and served as secretary general of the Cuban
trade union federation. At its national congress in November 1959, however,
Salvador's fortunes suddenly changed. The 26th of July Movement would
have scored an overwhelming victory over the Communists, if Fidel Castro
himself had not unexpectedly appeared at the congress, berated the dele-
gates for "having given proof neither of prudence, nor of unity, nor of
anything," and demanded, in effect, the installation of a triumvirate in the
federation's leadership, including the pro-Communist candidate, Jesus Solo,
The real leader soon became Soto, not Salvador, whom the Communist organ,
Hoy, began to attack openly for bis "strange attitude."

With his family, David Salvador was caught in November 1960 trying
to escape from Cuba in a small boat, and he has again been cast inlo prison,
this time by Batista's successor, Fidel Castro. The trade unions have lost
even the bargaining power they had under Batista; they have become
propaganda appendages of the Ministry of Labor which makes all de-
cisions on wages and conditions, Soviet-style.

What does all this mean? In his own 26th of July Movement, in the
rebel army and in the labor movement, Castro has shunted aside the very
ones who helped him in the struggle for power. He has done so, as Mme. de
Beauvoir has hinted, because they were led to expect a different revolution
from the one he is making. The 26th of July Movement was sacrificed first
because it was the embryo of a political party. It could grow into a full-
fledged party or become an empty shell. The rebel army has never recovered
from the shock of Castro's persecution of one of his closest former comrades-
in-arms, Major Hubert Matos, who was sentenced to 20 years* imprisonment
for having protested against the favoritism shown to Communists in the
army. As Mills remarks in Listen, Yankee I, "that was the biggest
blow,"

The "mass assemblies'* and amorphous militias now suit Castro's pur-
poses better because they are so impersonal and anonymous. The individuals
in ihe outdoor spectacles have a direct relationship only to Castro personally,
not to each other. The demonstrations are as "democratic" as Hitler's Nurem-
berg rallies and Mussolini's balcony speeches once were.

The 26th of July Movement and the rebel army were more than Castro's
personal emanations; their members were bound by a cause for which they
had fought and sacrificed together. That cause went back to a period before
Castro's personal rule and to a revolution waged against personal rule.
That Castro could not live with the 26ih of July Movement and the rebel
army is more than faintly reminiscent of Stalin's need to abolish ihe Society
of Old Bolsheviks.

14

6. THE TWO REVOLUTIONS

Lukewarm lemonade helped Jean-Paul Sartre to understand the nature
of Castro's "democracy."

One day, as he tells the story, Castro invited Mme. de Beauvoir and him-
self on an "inspection tour" of the Veradero beach. Soon the party stopped
at a little refreshment stand. Castro offered them some lemonade. He started
to drink some himself, put down his glass, and said loudly: "It's lukewarm.'*
Then the following dialogue ensued:

"Don't you have refrigerators?" Castro asked.

"Sure we do." the waitress said. "But they don't work."

"Have you reported it to your superior? 5 '

"Of course, last week. And it isn't a big job," she added familiarly. "An
electrician could do it in two hours of work. 5 '

"And no one has been ordered to make the repairs?"

She shrugged her shoulders, "You know how it is," she added.

And this is Sartre's comment on the scene:

"It was the first time that T understood — still somewhat vaguely — what
I called the other day 'direct democracy.' Between the waitress and Castro,
an immediate secret understanding {connivence) was established. . . ."

Castro was not yet satisfied. Sartre relates how Castro insisted on going
over to the delinquent refrigerator and vainly tried to fix it himself. At
length, Castro turned to the young waitress and muttered: "Tell your
superiors that if they don't get busy on their problems, they will have
problems with me,"

One reads and wonders. Could it really be that this banal and somewhat
embarrassing little scene convinced the famous and worldly French phi-
losopher that Castro's Cuba was—not an ordinary kind of democracy but
— a "direct democracy?" Involuntarily, my mind went back to some ex-
periences in the Dominican Republic a few years ago. There, too, the
Lider Maximo, who prefers being called El Jefe, liked to visit his domain,
see his subjects personally and settle problems on the spot. 7 To my dismay,
I discovered that there was much to be said for his regime in purely physical
terms, that the peasants worshipped him, that he could have won honest
elections quite as overwhelmingly as his fixed elections, and that the only
ones who seemed disturbed were a few intellectuals and other dubious middle-
class characters. It was easy to imagine the same scene played by El Jefe,
the young waitress, lukewarm lemonade, nnd the refrigerator that wouldn't
work, except perhaps that El Jefe, having had much more time, no longer
permitted lukewarm lemonade under any circumstances. But the greatest
blow of all came one day when I entered into a philosophical discussion with
a leading official and asked whether El Jefe's unique system had a name.
Gravely and courteously, he answered: "neo-democracy." I must have flushed
in anger. If only they would leave "democracy" alone! If Generalissimo

Ti Onn of Castro'a titles ia also
official newsnarier, "Revalue! 6 n,"

"El ,7o.fe do la BeTOlueUSn," aa on the front pnjui or the leading seml-
Ucmnbcr 10, 19C0. TIlc same Issue contains two "lldor lufixlaio."

15

Rafael Leonidaa TrujiiJo was the leader of a democracy, even a "neo-
democracy," who was not?

At bottom, all these "neo" and "direct" democracies rest on a simple
proposition: that the Leader and his people are one and indivisible. Hence
tnev need no representative institutions, no elections, no loyal or disloyal
oppositions, no free or partially critical press, none of the rights and safe-
guards traditionally associated with a democracy.

The horror of this thinking is that it wipes out the lessons to be learned
Irom the most desperate and tragic experiences of our time. If there is
anything that should have burned itself into our consciousness, it is the
excruciating evil of the popular despot, the beloved dictator, the mass Leader
lhe connivence which Sartre imagined between Castro and the waitress
existed between Hitler and a too Iar-e portion of the German people and
between Trupllo and an even larger portion of the Dominican people. More
horrible still is the fact that, with the whole modern machinery of propaganda
at their disposal, the Leaders can manufacture a reasonable facsimile of
popular consent even if they may not have it to start out with. Is it necessary
at this late date to recall these terrible lessons to Jean-Paul Sartre? Could he
have survived the "direct democracy" that he recommends to the Cubans?
Castro s "democracy" poses awkward problems for all his apologists. Their
argument runs: (a) Castro could win any election overwhelmingly and
therefore, (h) elections are unnecessary or harmful and ? anyway,*" (c) all
previous Cuban elections were crooked. Here, again, it seems necessary
to recall the ABC of democracy to people who pride themselves on being the
only real democrats. The democratic mandate is not one that once given
cannot be revoked; it is of the essence of democratic consent that it must
be periodically renewed. Most observers estimated Castro's popular support
at 90 per cent or more in January 1959, and at 75 per cent or more a year
later, but it may well be, as some claim, that the figure has been cut to
o0 per cent or less at the present time. It is no longer certain that he could
Win any election overwhelmingly or at all.

There have been three stages in Castro's attitude towards elections. First
he promised them. Then he said they were not immediately feasible. Now he
ridicules them. In effect, he once said: "Cuba has never had an honesl
election and a truly free press. I will show Cuba how to have them." Now
he says: "Cuba has never had an honest election and a truly free press
Therefore, Cuba has no right to have them under me." Here, in essence, are
the two revolutions of Fidel Castro.

The problem of elections is evaded by the counteroffer of something even
better. Huberman and Sweezy write: "What we do maintain is that the
revolution itself gives the Government a far more democratic mandate than
the freest of free elections ever could, and that it is the sacred duty of the
Government to carry out the oft-announced platform of the revolution before
it comes back to the people asking for either approval or further instructions."
What revolution? What platform? The revolution to restore the Constitution
of 1940 and hold elections in 12-18 months? Or the revolution against the
Constitution and against elections for an indefinite period? How can the

T6

Government come back to the people for "approval" and "further instructions"
when it has never once gone to them for approval or instructions?

The reference to the "oft-announced platform of the revolution" is simply
incredible. Huberman and Sweezy might have been less tempted to make
it if they had not successfully avoided stating that platform. They themselves
lell a story which belies it. According to them, the first draft of the agrarian
reform law contained no provision for cooperatives. All the revolutionaries
around Castro believed that the peasants were not ready for them. The
decision to have them was made by Castro alone against the better judgment
of his closest advisers and adherents. By Huberman and Sweezy's own
admission, then, Castro did not carry out "the oft-announced platform of the
revolution" as anyone else had understood it in this key area; he carried
out a basic revision of that platform to the surprise of everyone but Fidel
Castro. 8

But there is something even more deeply objectionable to this reasoning.
It implies that anyone who claims to possess the true idea of the revolution
confers on himself a more democratic mandate than any of the people, even
in the freest of free elections, can give him. The next step — and revolutionists
have taken it— is to say that it is "democratic" to make the revolution without
the people or despite the people— in, of course, the people's interest. Out of
such revolutions have invariably come the worst tyrannies.

7. SCAPEGOAT HISTORY

WHILE SOME writers see everything but Communism in Castro, others
see nothing but Communism. The most extreme version of this second
school of thought may be found in the book, Red Star Over Cuba, by Nathaniel
WeyL Weyl knew the international Communist movement from the inside
during the 1930s — he has testified that he once belonged to the same American
party unit as Alger Hiss — and he has also written a book on Mexico's
agrarian reform under ex-President Lazaro Cardenas. There is no indication,

rTFhc pr-^iit-ilav Cuban "cooperatives" are usually traced bad; to Castro's "History will Absolve Mo"
speech In 1053. A careful reading of the key passage in thut speech hardly beam this out.

"A revolutionary poveminent, after transferring the ownerghlj) of parcels or land to the one
hundred nuiii-iiihl small runners who today pay runt. would proceed to n, definite solution ol the
Unci ijnmlpiii hv, first: cslabllshinn. ns the Constitution orders, s maximum anrcaKQ for each type
of BBrUmUural 'enterprlan and acnulrlnR lhe WCesa acreage, by means of expropriation, recover tir
lanria iismixvl front the. State, filling In swuinu and marsh lands, jihunllng Tost tracts and nssciiat
zone* for rderwlntmn; H.dmd, rTUrlnutliir: Hit- rwiMinin^ bind ntnonc fiirmtrir. fitmlli™ With welM-
flucfl fflven rn the largest ones, encMiraglnjt ngrioultural COOperatkoa for tho common uhc of costly
equipment, cold storage, and a uniform professional dilution In cultivation and breeding, and.
finally, to facilitate assistance, nnnipnient, urotwtlon, and useful Imowtadn to t»c farming population
[ "FcnRanilaiUo Tolltioo, Econdmloo y Social du FLde] Castro," Editorial Lw, Havana. Jt»n.a, pp. 44-45).

haw purposely translated UlIf runnm in its literal form in orflnr to elw the reader a- mm of
i coon mat. Ives helonKed In tlm total se.lieme of Castro's 1303 MfiOTllturfll P.olley- They idiv oi.i-,l>

where cooperatives belonged

occupied

operatives

occupied * minor pliinn in the penerol Bcliema; they were Intended, In Iho traditional meaning of ca-
to service Independent landowners These lflliS cooperatives were cleatJy not the stiite farms

o: infill In addition. Castro aeonm to ha™ dropped or rarely mentioned "ewparatlvea after 11*53.

The version of this passage Ijl the ITnhnrnian-Swee/y bOOK (p. 41) 1* taken froiii Hie otilcinl wwA
translation of this ane™ii. uuMlshed by the Liberal Prwa, New York. For some reason, tho phrase for
the common iisn of nnstlv equipment, cold nfnmini" was oinltlori from this transhinmi im a. result or
vhleh trie whole section on cooper atiTOH is somewhat distorted. In lOaS. f.iwfro s n-Erarljni n-iuvm
meant what it has usuallv meant: land for landless pensnnta. Rut. then, llubemiart mid swemj- dWmvored.
via a translator, that Cuban peasants do not want tl«nr own land; they did not bvwi understand the
nm-dlon of owning their nmi hmd "unlll It hart been r-pcatodly rephrased and explained (p. 1(1, note).
llnlierman and Swwbt add that this Incident set them off on their entire interpretation of ho flubim
iKwnluHnnl If so, lhe Cnlmn priunlUa are truly milium, and no one Hppurenrly ever umler.iumd them neforo
—certainly not Fidel Cafltro who put HO much ompb&slg on Riving them thfir own land in lOBB and alter.

17

however, that he has had a personal knowledge of Cuba in the last two years
or at any other time.

Much of Weyl's hook 5 s based on police and intelligence sources, such as
the Batista regime's Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities
(BRAC.) A lurid series of articles in a sensation-mongering New York
tabloid is treated as if it were a serious historical source. The recklessness
with which Weyl uses his materials, good, bad and dubious, is matched
by that of his views. These range from the conviction that Fidel Castro has
been "a trusted Soviet agent" since 1948, when he was little more than 21
years old, to the imputation that Cuba was lost to Communism by "appease-
ment-oriented" officials of the State Department. The implicit thesis of the
book was stated by Senators James Eastland (D.-Miss.) and Thomas Dodd
(D.-Corm.) of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, whom Weyl
quotes: "Cuba was handed to Castro and the Communists by a combination
of Americans in the same way that China was handed to the Communists."
In effect, this is the extreme "right-wing'' case against Castro and those who
allegedly put him into power.

Weyl's methods hardly inspire confidence in his results. He makes some
members of the State Department the butt of his indignation for having
failed to accept the evidence that Castro has been a Communist and Soviet
agent for a dozen years. But, for some reason, he fails to mention that
General C. P. Cabell, Deputy Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,
testified in November 1959 before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
(one of his favorite sources) that "we believe that Castro is not a member
of the Communist party, and does not consider himself to be a Communist."
Presumably the CIA had gone to some trouble to find out all about Castro's
past political allegiances and was less riddled than the State Department with
"appeasement-minded subordinates" (Weyl's phrase for then Under Secretary
Christian Herter, Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs, Roy R,
Rubottom, and Director of the Caribbean Division William A. Wieland).
The CIA may have been wrong, but its evaluation of the evidence certainly
has a bearing on Weyl's case against members of the State Department with
a similar view.

Weyl, however, cites the testimony before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee of Raphael Diaz Balart (Castro's former brother-in-law), who
worked for Batista to the end. He writes that Diaz Balart gave "basically
the same account" as that of Dr. Emilio Nunez Portuondo, Batista's former
Prime Minister, who declared that "Fidel Castro subordinated himself to
Communist party discipline during his first year at the University (1945-46)
and used his Party name of Fidelio." Weyl then quotes those portions of
Diaz Balart's testimony which indicate that Castro and the Communist
students had had "a very nice understanding" about helping each other. But
he does not quote Diaz Balart's direct assertion: "No, he was not in that
moment a member. He was just in that moment an opportunist leader who
wanted to promote himself." Basically Diaz Balart gave anything but the
same account as Nunez Portuondo.

Weyl also plays fast and loose in his references to Communist money

IS

1

allegedly put at Castro's disposal in the Sierra Maestra. He quotes from the
articles by two newspapermen in the New York Daily News: " 'Once ' said a
man who was close to Fidel, 'Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, an active member of
the Communist party in Cuba, arrived with a dozen men loaded with money.
It came to $800,000 and Fidel hugged him and shouted, 'Now we're ready
to win the war/ " Thus Weyl quotes two newspapermen who quote "a man
who was dose to Fidel." But some 30 pages later, Weyl writes: "We have
seen that Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, who was not only a member of the Political
Bureau of the Cuban Communist party, but its brains, went to the Sierra
Maestra to bring Fidel Castro almost a million dollars." There is no doubt
about Rafael Rodriguez' journey to the Sierra Maestra in June 19.58— he
readily admitted it to me when I talked to him last spring— but only a
reader with a short memory would "have seen" that Rafael Rodriguez had
brought Fidel Castro almost a million dollars. Perhaps he did, but the
evidence is third-hand at best. Nevertheless, Weyl goes on to assert that
"Fidel Castro's forces won primarily because they had almost unlimited
supplies of money."

How much more complex Cuban politics can he than Weyl appears to
make it may be gathered from his reference to Raul Roa. Weyl writes that
one of the Cuban Communist party's "charter members and early leaders
was Raul Roa, whom Fidel Castro would later appoint Foreign Minister of
Cuba,' 7 That is all From this a reader might suppose that Roa was just
another Communist functionary in Castro's entourage. But Roa has had a
rather more varied political career. He wrote an article in Mexico in 1956
denouncing "the crimes, disasters and outrages perpetrated" by the Soviet
"invaders" in Hungary. This article, together with other uncomplimentary
references to Communism, were reprinted in his book, En Pie, issued by an
official publishing house in Cuba in October 1959. The Communist leader,
Bias Roca, in the official Communist organ, Hoy, of March 11, 1959,
denounced Roa as a platlista—the historical equivalent of an "agent of
American imperialism." 9 Yet Roa has become a servile spokesman of the
Communism and Soviet Union which he had many times condemned. He has
never, however, completely won the trust of the Communists, one of whom
has been put in as his Under Secretary.

Weyl also identifies Faustino Peres as a Communist on the basis of
Batista's sources. The official Cuban Communists have always blamed Perez
(the leader of the former Havana underground) for the failure of the April
1958 strike on the ground that he refused to make a deal with them. They
took their revenge in November 1959 when he was ousted from Castro's
Government for protesting against the treatment of Major Hubert Matos.
Weyl even cites a "Cuban underground" report that Matos worked for the
Communists "as early as 1957," without saying a word about the price
Matos has paid for his anti-Communism. Such blunders are inevitable in

i^™i°'< °£^° ?.- PIatt f £™ his "«» to fl« famous amendment wliifih empowernrt the V H to
EtfTS t'gStaFS Cuba S ™ t0r FUtt ' B ** B * ma "* the dBt * * hlB «^™TS^* eJSS

1?

a hook which accepts Batista's and Trujillo's sources uncritically. Communists,
ex-Comm musts, non-Communists and opportunists are indiscriminately
lumped together. Every bit of evidence that does not fit the hook's thesis
is ruthlessly suppressed or glossed over. All the hard problems of Castro s
political developments are over-simplified and vulgarized.

Sometimes a reader of both the Mills and Weyl hooks might he hopelessly
puzzled. Mills' Yankee is taunted with the question, "What did you do-
about the weapons, for example, the Yankee Government kept sending— and
sending — and sending — to Batista?" But in Weyl's hook, former Ambassador
Earl E. T. Smith says of the United States' decision to stop sending arms to
Batista in March 1958, that "the psychological impact on the morale of the
government was crippling." In his recent book, Respuesta (Reply), published
in Mexico, Fulgencio Batista also complains bitterly against the harmful
effect of the U.S. embargo on arms, A reader of Mills' hook would never
know that the arms had ever been cut off. A reader of Weyl's book would
never know that the effect of the arms embargo was partially undone by
the failure to withdraw the military mission.

Weyl's chief American scapegoat is Herbert L. Matthews of the New York
Times. In February 1957, Matthews published three articles and photographs
which proved that Castro was alive, and he vouched for his idealism, courage,
and innocence of Communism. The chief count against William Wieland
seems to be that he advised the newly -appointed Ambassador Smith to be
briefed by Matthews before assuming his post. Rubottom's main misdeed
appears to have been that he told a Senate subcommittee on December 31,
1958, the day before Batista's flight, that "there was no evidence of any
organized Communist element within the Castro movement or that Sefior
Castro himself was under Communist influence." As if this were not trouble
enough for Rubottom, he also stands accused of having been the protege of
Dr. Milton Eisenhower, whom Weyl brushes ofT as "a well-intentioned, vaguely
Leftist, former New Deal bureaucrat."

Ambassador Smith's briefing by Matthews, which promises to become a
minor cause celebre in some circles of American politics, runs true to form
in Weyl's book. On checking, I found that Ambassador Smith had testified:
"I spent six weeks in Washington, approximately four days of each week,
visiting various agencies and being briefed by the State Department and
those whom the State Department designated." He also said that "in the
course of six weeks I was briefed by numbers of people in the usual course
as every Ambassador is briefed." One of these people, suggested by Wieland,
was Matthews. Weyl converts this testimony to; "Ambassador Smith made
the remarkable disclosure that Wieland sent him to none other than Herbert
Matthews to get bis briefing on Cuban affairs before departing for bis post
in Havana." Thus "a" briefing is transformed into "his" briefing, as if
Matthews were the only one to brief Smith. And it is hard to understand
what is remarkable about the recommendation of Matthews in May 1957,
among many others, since at the lime he was one of the very few Americans
who had talked to Fidel Castro.

Some other testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee,
which Weyl does not quote, might not have been irrelevant. According to

20

i

Batista's commander in the Sierra Maestra area. Colonel Ugalde Carrillo, his
forces there numbered 6,000 to 7.000. He estimated Castro's men at 700 to
£00* In addition, Batista's Army contained more than 33,000 men elsewhere.
This force of over 40,000 bad for years obtained as much arms as it had
wanted from the United States and elsewhere. The American Ambassador
from 1953 to the middle of 1957, Arthur Gardner, was so "pro-Batista" that,
as Mrs. Ruby Hart Phillips (the long-time New York Times correspondent
in Havana) has written in her recent book, the dictator was ^.mbarrassed
because he thought that the Ambassador was overdoing it. Despite Matthews'
remarkable briefing, Gardner's successor, Earl Smith, was so "anti-Castro"
that his subordinates pleaded with him in vain to be less partisan. And
despite Matthews' pro-Castro artit es of February 1957, Castro's entire force
14 months later numbered only 300 (according to Mills) and at most 800
(-according to Ugalde).

The forces at Batista^s disposal were to the very end so superior in numbers
and weapons that only a vast popular revulsion can account for Batista's
debacle. Batista's Chief-of-Staff s General Francisco Tabernilla, came much
closer to the truth when he was asked whether the Army could have
successfully resisted Castro's march on Havana. "It could," he replied, "but
not for a long time, because by that time, the people of Cuba were already
against the regime of Batista, and there is no army, once the people get up
in arms, that can suppress it."

Herbert Matthews has expressed his latest views in the Hispanic American
Report (August 29, I960, Stanford University). He has evidently been
saddened by the development of Castro's regime into "a dictatorship, without
freedom, under the control of one man." He maintains: "Despite strong
resemblances, it is not Marxism, Communism or Fascism, but it is getting
close to a totalitarian structure of some sort." Yet, even as Matthews wrote
these words, Guevara was characterizing the Cuban revolution as implicitly
"Marxist." Matthews also continues to resist the evidence of Castro's deliberate
policy of aid-and-comfort to the official Communists. For example, he declares
that "Fidel played into their hands unwittingly from the beginning by
allowing his 26th of July Movement, which had made and won the revolution,
to wither away. This left a vacuum into which the Reds naturally moved."
Unwittingly? It was, as has been admitted, a cold-blooded decision, no more
unwitting than the more recent one to "allow" the rebel army to wither away.
Unlike some pro-Castro apologists, however, Matthews does not pooh-pooh
the possibility of Communist domination. On the contrary, he regards it as
so far advanced that "the point of no return does not seem far away." But
in his anxiety to absolve Castro himself of the prime responsibility, he
sometimes argues that Castro's pro-Communist policy was logical, sometimes
that he blundered into it, and sometimes that he was pushed into it. In effect,
Matthews' faith in Castro has dimmed but not died, and he is still capable
of writing: "Paradoxical though it may seen, Americans should be praying
that nothing happens to Fidel Castro. Any hope of changing the situation
for the better lies with him."

21

8. WHOSE REVOLUTION?

ON ONE thing Mills, Johnson and Weyl almost agree. For Mills, Castro's
regime is "a revolutionary dictatorship of the peasants and workers."
For Johnson, it is a "genuine dictatorship of the proletariat." For Weyl, it is
"a dictatorship of the proletariat." What can these long-suffering, ill-defined
words mean in relation to Cuba today?

When I visited Cuba last spring, the Cabinet — a fair sampling of the
top leadership — was made up of eight lawyers, three former students, two
professors, one architect, one engineer and the like. Most of them still
hold the same offices or have been replaced by people of the same type.
Everyone attended a university (some in the United States), came from
upper- or middle-class homes, and became or aspired to become a professional
or intellectual. Not a single one represents in any conceivable sense the
peasantry or proletariat^ or owes his position to its organized strength or
pressure. What they are they owe solely to Fidel Castro, and they are
responsible to him alone. This much is recognized by Mills who flatly states
that Castro possesses "virtually absolute power" in Cuba today. But where
does that leave the "dictatorship of the peasants and workers?"

Reflecting on the situation as they saw it in the spring of i960, Hubeiman
and Sweezy gave the peasantry the decisive role in the victorious revolution.
made Castro the "embodiment of the revolutionary will and energy of the
peasantry," and extolled the Cuban peasantry as "perhaps one of the world's
most deeply revolutionary classes" and "as radical a social class as any in
the world today." Six months later they returned to Cuba and discovered
that the peasantry had been superseded as the "most revolutionary class" by
the working class and that the peasant-manned and -nourished rebel arm) 1
had suffered a relative eclipse. They were delighted in the spring and they
were enchanted in the fall; the peasant revolution was wonderful and the
swift dispossession of the peasant revolution was even more so. But why the
peasantry should have been superseded if it really was "as radical a social
class as any in the world today," they do not try to explain. It is conceivable
that the class which had really made the revolution, which the Lider Maximo
embodied^ and which was perhaps the most deeply revolutionary class in the
world today, would permit itself to be pushed into the background without
a word of protest or token of resistance? Is this the behavior of a class
towards its revolution?

The process thus conjured up is clearly mythological. Those who "gave"
the revolution to the peasantry could also take it away. The peasantry never
had in its hands any of the levers of command of the revolution, before or
after the victory. The revolution was made and always controlled by declassed
eons and daughters of the middle class, first in the name of the entire people,
then of the peasants, and now of the workers and peasants. At most the
revolution is doing things for and to the peasants and workers. The good
and evil in these things may be open to debate, but who decides these things
and to what class they belong are not. For Marx, the notion that the peasants
would have been the driving force of a socialistic revolution would have

22

been simply unthinkable; the idea that the working class would have to be
swept" into a socialist revolution after it had been made by another class
and as a mechanical result of nationalization from above, equally so.

The alleged role of the working class in this revolution is just as fanciful
as that attributed to the peasantry. In December a few hundred authentic
proletarians employed by the Cuban Electric Company staged a protest
march from union headquarters to the Presidential Palace. The rank-and-file
was discontented because the new management of the nationalized electric
company had cracked down on privileges long tolerated under the dictatorship
and thereby had reduced its standard of living. The leadership, headed by an
old 26th of July militant, was enraged because the central Trade Union
Federation (now completely controlled by the Communists) had moved to
oust it. The rebellion was, quelled by the flight of the union leaders to foreign
embassies and a long, angry speech by Prime Minister Castro. He admitted
that a large part not only of the electric workers but of the mass of workers
in general was "confused.' 5 He scorned those who would exchange "the right
of the working class to govern and direct the country for a plate of lentils."
At one point, he declared; "Do you know what is the first goal for which
the working class should fight, the only goal for which a working class in a
modern country should fight fundamentally? For the conquest of political

power

This speech was noteworthy for the political vocabulary employed for the
first time by Castro, but it told much more about him than about the Cuban
proletariat. Would it be necessary to exhort the proletariat to take power in
a "dictatorship of the proletariat?" And if it followed his advice, would all
the lawyers in Castro's Government remain in power? Of all the dictatorships
of the proletariat which have been bestowed on us in this century. Castro's
is surely the least convincing.

Events have also dealt unkindly with Jean-Paul Sartre's clairvoyance. In
the introduction (dated September 12, 1960) to the Brazilian edition of his
series of articles on Cuba, he wrote: "No, if Cuba desires to separate from
the Western bloc, it is not through the crazy ambition of linking itself to the
Eastern bloc." He also communicated his certainty that "its objective is
not to strengthen one bloc to the detriment of the other." On December 10,
Major Guevara was "crazy" enough to announce publicly in Moscow: "We
wholeheartedly support the statement adopted by this conference [of 81
Communist parties]." It would be hard to imagine any way of linking Cuba
more closely to the Eastern bloc or of strengthening that bloc to the detriment
of the West than the wholehearted support of this statement.

The attitude of Paul Johnson in the New Stolemon toward Latin America
in general and Cuba in particular smacks of a peculiar kind of anti-colonial
colonialism. For him, their basic economic problems cannot be solved
"through mere electoral victories, since effective legislation requires the
assent of the armed forces." Therefore, only Fidelismo or Communism- —
which he regards as "natural enemies" — remain as practical alternatives. In
the case of Cuba, he seems to have cut the ground under his own argument
since the armed forces disappeared and the need for their assent vanished

23

with them. The main theme of Castro's "History Will Absolve Me" speech
of 1953 and of all his statements until he assumed power was that Cuba's
social and economic problems could be solved within the framework of the
Constitution of 1940. But there was one thing the Constitution excluded —
the dictatorship of a Lider Maximo and his junta. The colonialists used to
say thai some peoples were not fil for anything but some form of imperialism:
The anti-colonial colonialists say that some peoples are not fit for anything
but some form of totalitarianism.

In the end, one wonders how far such words as "socialism,' 5 "democracy,"
"Marxism," and "dictatorship of the proletariat" can be stretched. For some
of Castro's admirers, they can be stretched to the point of meaninglessness.

Five years ago, for example, Huberman and Sweezy were shocked by
Nikita Khrushchev's expose at the Soviet Communist parly's 20th Congress
of his predecessor's vices. After a suitable period of reflection and repentance,
they came up with a theory of Stalinism as "good ends with bad means."
They explained that Stalinism "became the instrument of the advance to so-
cialism" but, unhappily, "incorporated the methods of oriental despotism —
murder, mendacity, duplicity, brutality, and above all arbitrariness." 10 This
view of Stalinism has its roots in a certain conception of socialism. In this con-
ception all that essentially matters is that the economy should be nationalized.
The nationalizing state may be murderous, mendacious, guilty of duplicity,
brutal and arbitrary, but it is still "socialist," And by separating the ends from
the means, the political from the economic, what the state controls from
who controls the state, socialism can be arrived at through oriental despotisms
or pseudo-peasant revolutions.

9. THE CUBAN VARIANT

Marxian socialism was predicated not merely on a nationalized econo-
my but on the harmonious development of several factors. The
achievement of economic democracy by the socialist revolution presupposed
the achievement of political democracy by the bourgeois-democratic revolu-
tion. For this reason, the classical Marxists took political democracy for
granted, as we no longer can, and they assumed that economic democracy
would be built on it. They conceived of socialism as the culmination of
capitalist development, without which the prerequsites of socialism — an
advanced industrial economy and a preponderant, improverished, class-
conscious proletariat — could not be fulfilled.

History has not worked out that way. Where capitalism has been successful,
the prerequisite of a preponderant, impoverished, class-conscious proletariat
has not been fulfilled; and where capitalism has not been successful, the
prerequisite of an advanced industrial economy has also not been fulfilled.
Either the middle class has not been strong enough to achieve a viable
capitalist economy or it has been strong enough to bar the way to a socialist
economy.

w. "MontUy Eerlew/" July-August 1»W, pp. TUl,

24

This familiar dilemma of modern socialism has spawned all sorts of bastard
and spurious "socialisms." Instead of tbe proletariat, they issue out of the
middle class, but of that portion in revolt against the failure of the middle
class. These sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie gravitate irresistibly
toward the ideology of socialism, but they can make use only of those aspects
of socialism which conditions permit them to utilize. They cannot be faithful
to the fundamental ideas of the socialist tradition— that the proletariat
should liberate itself, that there are prerequisites of socialism, especially an
advanced industrial economy, and that socialism must fulfill and complement
political democracy.

But there is one aspect of socialism on which they can seize without delay
or restraint. They can find in Marxism an ideological sanction for the
unrestricted and unlimited use of the state to change the social order, and
they can find in Leninism a sanction for their unrestricted and unlimited
power over the state. In classical Marxism, the role of the socialist stale
was conditioned by the stage of development at which it was put into effect
and by the class relationships which governed its realization. In this caricature
of socialism, however, the only prcrequsile that really matters is the seizure
of power, no matter by whom, how, when, or where. Thus we live in a time
not only of "Cuban socialism" but of "Indonesian socialism" and even of
"African socialism."

This phenomenon indicates that we are badly in need of new words to
assume some of the burden that has been thrust on socialism. The order of
development cannot be inverted— first tbe revolution, then the prerequisites
of socialism — without resulting in a totally different kind of social order,
alien to the letter and. infinitely more, to the spirit of socialism. These
inverted revolutions from above belong to what, for want of a better word,
we must call the Communist family of revolutions, which, in practice, serve
to industrialize the peasantry rather than to liberate the proletariat. But even
this family has grown so large and now covers so much ground that its
name does not necessarily guarantee full understanding.

For about 30 years, the only Communism was Russian Communism and.
in effect, Communism was whatever the Russians said it was. Then, in 1948,
came the Titoist variant — a small Communist state in rebellion against Rus-
sian domination- — and, at the end of 1949, the Chinese variant — a Communist
state so vast that it could rival Soviet Russia in power. But both the Yugoslav
and Chinese Communist leaderships derived from a common source, the
Comintern* which from 1919 to 1943 was tightly controlled by and wholly
dependent on the Russian Communists. Thus far the line of descent was
clear and direct.

Now a new branch of the family has begun to emerge. It is related to the
national-revolutionary movements which the world Communist movement
long before Khrushchev had recognized as a distinct force and with which
it had sometimes collaborated and sometimes competed. As late as 1954, the
Soviet press attacked Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah and his parly as
a "screen" for British imperialism. Under Khrushchev, however, the pendu-
lum has swung over to the outermost limits of collaboration. This policy,

25

apparently one of the points at issue between the Russian and Chinese
Communis! parties, reflects the undeniable fact of the last few years that
no Communist has been a match for Nkrumah in Ghana, Sekou Toure in
Guinea, or Fidel Castro in Cuba. The local Communists were, therefore.
advised to bide their time and achieve their goal in two stages instead of
one. First the national-revolutionary movement could win power, then the
Communists could win power in the national-revolutionary movements.

This strategy owes its succes3 to a shrewd assessment of the national-
revolutionary movements. They are far more capable than the Communists
of achieving national unity against the common enemy. But the common
enemy, not a social and political program, gives them their raison d'etre.
As a result, they are much more inspiring and effective, before taking power
than they are afterward. Filling ihe political and social vacuum the day after
the revolution gives the Communists greater opportunities than they had
during the revolution. Above all, the nationalist leaders are usually men
whose magnetic mass appeal is combined with intellectual fuzziness, adven-
turist temperaments, and insatiable egos. Their strong point makes them
indispensable and their weak points vulnerable to the Communists. They
serve the Communists only on condition that the Communists should appear
to be serving them. Their political school was nothing like the Comintern,
and they represent a variant still farther away from the Russian prototype
than Marshal Tito or Mao Tse-tung.

This variant has gone farther in Cuba than anywhere else, though the
story is far from finished there, too. For this reason, Fidel Castro has cast
such a large shadow from such a small island.

The phenomenon of Fidel Castro has, as yet, received little serious study.
His revolution may not be the one that he promised to make, but it is for
all thai a genuine revolution. It is related to other upheavals in countries
with similar national and social resentments and inequalities, ft cannot be
dismissed as nothing more than a diabolical aberration because it is not
what it claims to be. It belongs to a new type of system, neither capitalist
nor socialist, that emerges where capitalism has not succeeded and socialism
cannot succeed. In most pro* and anti-Castro propaganda, the revolution that
brought him into power is so ruthlessly distorted that his entire political
development begins and ends in fantasy. The serious student will seek
answers to questions that the mycologists of "Left" and "Right" do not
even ask. How could a revolution basically middle-class in nature be turned
against that class? How could a revolution made without the official Commu-
nists and for the most part despite them become so intimately linked with
them? How, in short, could Fidel Castro promise one revolution and make
another, and what consequences flowed from this revolutionary schizophrenia?

The answers, as I have suggested, take us into territory that has been as
yet hardly explored. For the Communists and the Fidelistas to meet, both
had to travel some distance from their starting-points. The Communists had
to make up their minds that they could win power, not against Fidel but
only through Fidel. In all probability, this decision was made after an
internal struggle in the first half of 1958 between the Old Guard "Stalinist"

26

leadership headed by the general secretary, Bloa Rooa, and i\ more flexible
"Khrushchevite" group represented by the editor of the party organ, Carloi
Rafael Rodriguez. Some compclenl observer* believe thai ihe deal WBI made
in the Sierra Maestra before Castro took power and Mini all his moves have

been determined by this pad. Others think thai he wenl through a period
of wavering and vacillation in the first months of his ngimr, In any raw,
his major decisions were made so secretively and wilhin such a small group
that even former members of his Government profess lo In- ujurrtairi of (lis
commitments and motives.

The inner history of Castro's regime remains to be told. Its main lines,
however, have become increasingly clear. Fidel Castro — as much demagogue
as idealist, as much adventurer as revolutionary, as much anarchist as
Communist or anything else — was suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted
into power without a real party, a real army, or a real program. In the
struggle for power, he had put forward no original economic or political
ideas and had stayed well within the limits of traditional democratic reform
and idiom in Cuba. He differed from Batista's other enemies chiefly in the
tactics he was willing to employ, in his faith in armed struggle and his
willingness to organize it. But once power came into his hands, he refused
to permit anything that might lessen or restrict it. He -would not tolerate
the functioning of a government which was not the facade of his personal
rule or of a party which might develop a life of its own. His power and his
promises were from the first incompatible, and this contradiction forced him
to seek a basis for his regime wholly at variance with that of the anti-Batista
revolution. He did not have the disciplined and experienced cadres, the
ideology, and the international support to switch revolutions in full view of
the audience. Only the Cuban and Russian Communists could make them
available to him. Having formerly collaborated with Batista (whose Govern-
ment once contained both Juan Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez), the
Cuban Communists were easily capable of collaborating with Castro. The
"united front" of Communists and Fidelistas is heading, as Guevara recently
intimated in Moscow, towards a "united party," and if it materializes, Fidel
Castro will certainty go down in history not as the Lider Maximo of a new
movement but as the Pied Piper of an old one. Still, as long as the Communists
need him at least as much as he needs them, further surprises cannot be ruled
out; Fidel's ego may give the Communists as much trouble as it has given
many others.

When I returned from Cuba last spring, I wrote: "Castro once spoke of
his revolution as 'liberty with bread and without terror.' If he continues
to push too hard, too fast, and too far, Cuba may yet have more terror
without either bread or liberty/' 11 Unfortunately, my worst apprehensions
have come true, and Fidel Castro has given Cuba not a national revolution
hut an international civil war.

"■ Tlii-odoro Dm per, "Tim Rtuiaway Revolution," "The Eeportpr," May 12, I9fl0,

27

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